The UN and abortion: how concessions turn into permanent international pressure

“The most comprehensive act of killing which can be observed today is directed against the unborn. It is to be foreseen that this phenomenon, which possesses with respect to the ‘individual’ the sense of a greater security of a particular lifestyle, will play, for the typus, the role of demographic policy. It is equally easy to sense the rediscovery of the very old science of depopulation politics (…).”

– E. Jünger, The Worker (1932)

The contemporary system of human rights protection, built around the mechanisms of the United Nations, should be a space for dialogue and mutual respect for the sovereignty of states. Meanwhile, we are witnessing growing pressure on countries with conservative values in the particularly sensitive area of abortion regulation. One of the main tools of this pressure is the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a human rights review mechanism in which states evaluate each other and recommend changes.

Although abortion regulation issues account for only a fraction of all recommendations, the surprisingly strong influence of a few countries, especially in the West, means that legal changes (or the lack thereof) in conservative countries become a pretext for further pressure and demands for increasingly radical liberalization.

Universal Periodic Review – a multilateral control tool with the potential to interfere with sovereignty

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is an official UN mechanism in which the state of human rights in each member state is assessed on a regular basis, approximately every 4 to 5 years. Countries then have the obligation to accept or reject the recommendations made to them by other countries. This is a seemingly transparent and cooperative method of monitoring, which should provide an impetus for improving the protection of civil and fundamental rights.

However, a closer analysis shows that although the topics of so-called “sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR)” appear rarely in UPR recommendations – only in fractions of a percent (less than 1% of recommendations concern abortion, and about 4% concern SOGI – “sexual orientation and gender identity”) – in reality, the pressure for liberalization is concentrated and very clear.

The example of Iceland, which alone accounts for 21% of recommendations on abortion in the third cycle of the UPR (2017-2022) and 28% in the fourth cycle (2022-2027), shows how even a single active participant in this system can create global pressure. On the other hand, over 160 out of 193 countries did not submit any recommendations on abortion, which shows that global pressure does not result from a homogeneous consensus, but is the result of the actions of a minority of countries promoting liberal standards.

It is therefore important to understand the UPR not only as a tool for dialogue and support, but also as a potential battlefield where legal reforms become a starting point for permanent expectations and pressure from international organizations and states with specific agendas.

International treaties and their interpretations – when silence means more than words

The invocation of UN treaty bodies such as the Human Rights Committee (HRC), the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), and the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) as legal grounds for forcing the liberalization of abortion laws requires critical analysis. The texts of the most important conventions, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the CEDAW Convention, do not explicitly establish a “right to abortion” or regulate the issue of so-called sexual identity. Article 6 of the ICCPR refers to the right to life, and Article 12 of the CEDAW refers to the right to health, and neither mentions as a necessity access to abortion or the so-called “sexual and reproductive rights” (which the pro-abortion lobby understands as including a “right to abortion” that does not exist in international law).

Nevertheless, since the 1990s, treaty bodies have begun to interpret these provisions in an expanded manner, attributing to them an obligation to liberalize abortion law. Examples include interventions against Colombia and Peru. This is a classic example of overinterpretation of the law, where bodies—without even having a mandate to create such norms—in practice exert pressure on states to implement specific social and legal policies.

This shifting of treaty boundaries, often without the involvement of the international community in the form of negotiations or ratification, has become the main instrument of pressure in the international arena. This creates a paradox: treaties are formally silent on the right to abortion, but the procedures and recommendations arising from them are treated in some circles as binding standards that must be implemented contrary to internal democratic decisions and the local culture. Importantly, these recommendations are treated by many states as an expression of international commitment, even though they have never been adopted as part of a ratification process and constitute only so-called soft law.

Liberalization as a gateway to permanent pressure

The cases of countries such as Ireland, Argentina, Colombia, and Poland illustrate how this mechanism works. In Ireland, the Mellet v. Ireland case of 2016 showed that even partial liberalization of abortion rights, introduced by the Act of 2013, which expressly allowed abortion in cases where the mother’s life was at risk, did not end the matter. A woman who learned of her child’s irreversible defect traveled abroad to have an abortion. The UN Human Rights Committee recognized this necessity as a violation of human rights, and the government’s decision to liberalize the law did not end the pressure—on the contrary, it became an invitation to exert further pressure.

In Argentina, which legalized abortion up to 14 weeks of pregnancy in 2021, the story does not end with the liberalization achieved. Already in 2022, the UN again pressed for the abolition of conscience clauses—the legal right of medical personnel to refuse to participate in abortion on ethical grounds—and the elimination of other obstacles that hindered access to the procedure. 

The situation is similar in Colombia and Peru, countries that have pushed through a partial liberalization of their laws on abortion but are still under pressure to eliminate all restrictions, even procedural ones or those based on conscience. In this way, instead of bringing peace and stability, reforms activate mechanisms of further pressure and escalation.

Poland as a clear example of the mechanism of international pressure

Poland, a country with clearly expressed social attitudes towards the protection of life, has been the victim of intense pressure, especially after the 2020 ruling of the Constitutional Tribunal  on family planning, the protection of the human fetus, and the conditions for the admissibility of abortion, which banned abortions motivated by an uncurable disease or a congenital defect of the unborn child.

Going against the reality on the field in Poland, CEDAW initiated a procedure in which it found Polish law to be in violation of the convention and assessed it as “cruel and degrading.” In the next cycle of UPR for 2022–2027, Poland received a total of 17 recommendations on SRHR, including those concerning the full decriminalization of abortion, universal access to medical abortion, and the abolition of the conscience clause.

Meanwhile, polls indicate that public support for the complete liberalization of abortion solely on the grounds that a woman does not want to have a child stands at around 18% of Poles (data for 2023), which means that external pressure often runs counter to the democratic mandate and will of the people. This is a typical example of a mechanism in which a step that is more conservative than expected by international institutions triggers an avalanche of further demands and pressure.

Abortion – an ideological narrative under the guise of public health protection?

Organizations such as the WHO and the Guttmacher Institute estimate that every year there are approximately 73 million “unsafe” (ie, illegal) abortions worldwide, resulting in a significant number of maternal deaths and serious complications, especially in countries with inadequate health care. In the context of the arguments surrounding abortion, the question of its impact on public health is important. However, the key issue here is not only the legality of abortion itself, but broader access to healthcare in general, particularly perinatal care. It is worth noting that changes in abortion law are often used by various organizations as part of ideological politics, rather than necessarily as a response to real health problems.

Summary and recommendations

The UPR mechanism was intended to be a forum for the exchange of good practices and peaceful reflection on the state of human rights. In theory, it is a tool of mutual review among equals for the common good. In practice, however, it is increasingly becoming a vehicle for ideological pressure, where specific countries use it to export their own legal solutions, often without any basis in international treaties. What is more, the liberalization of laws—especially in the area of so-called “sexual and reproductive rights”—does not end the debate, but intensifies it. The UPR then becomes the arena for the next phase of negotiations: successive cycles bring more far-reaching demands, regardless of the level of previous reforms or local social consensus. It is therefore essential to educate and explain the UPR mechanism, showing the public and decision-makers the complex system of multilateral control, indicating how and by whom recommendations are formulated and what consequences they may have for national law.

However, if the UPR is to retain its credibility and constructive function in the international system, several key changes should be considered:

1. The principle of proportionality and thematic balance – Recommendations should correspond to the actual scale of human rights violations and not reflect particular ideological demands. Issues that do not have a uniform definition in international law (e.g., the so-called right to abortion) should be treated with due caution.

1. Greater emphasis on treaty consensus – The UN system should not go beyond the formal agreements of the nation-states. Interpretations by expert committees (CEDAW, HRC) cannot aspire to be treated as having the same force as the treaty itself.

1. Voluntary and transparent recommendations – Each recommendation should be clearly marked as a political suggestion, not an interpretation of a treaty obligation. Nation-states should be able to object to attempts to reinterpret treaty law in a manner not agreed upon.

1. Closure mechanism – A country that meets specific, clearly defined criteria (e.g., in the areas of basic health care, the right to information, access to psychological support, and perinatal care) should be able to formally close the thematic cycle in order to avoid permanent pressure and repeated recommendations of an ideological nature.

If the UPR is to serve the common good and not the geopolitical or cultural interests of specific groups of countries, courage is needed to restore the mechanism to its original principles: respect for sovereignty, legal pluralism, and genuine dialogue between nations, rather than the ideological promotion and imposition of a single vision of “progress” which is in fact an extreme left-wing political agenda. The Ordo Iuris Institute consistently defends the principle that abortion is not international law and that we should staunchly oppose all attempts to introduce this practice, which violates the most fundamental right, i.e., the right to life, into the established human rights system.